Build in quality

(In this SmartBits, Girish Elchuri outlines “Build in quality“.  The video is at the end of this blog)

One of the important things we have to remember is that we can not add quality. Adding quality is not similar to painting a wall. It has to be built in and for that, we should have all the processes in place, starting from architecture, design and development and so on.

An example in this context would be the way a German car company makes cars. They build the car, do extensive testing, fix it and then only release it to the customers so that they get an excellent product. Looking at another company in Japan that makes high end luxury cars, when this company finds a problem in one of the cars before it is shipped off, they stop the assembly line. Then, they find out where the defect has been introduced, fix the process and throw away all the cars that are manufactured with that defective process, and start manufacturing again. The result is that Japanese car with the same quality and luxury of German car is build at one-third the cost. It is a classic living example we have.

Building quality through absolute processes is more beneficial, important and efficient than trying to add quality or stating that quality can always be added later. When a pizza gets burnt then can the quality assurance team make it proper? Certainly not, because it is a one-way process. It is important to realize that we can’t add quality. 

We have to only build quality into a product as part of our architecture, design and development. It has to be the attitude of the organization. It has to come from top- down. Organizations, people and processes should have the attitude of building quality in and not adding it later.